Generic Critical Online Reasoning Skills – Measurement, Development, and Comparative Analyses across Academic Domains
Background and Study Focus
Students learn in very diverse learning environments, with the internet becoming increasingly important in the information acquisition. Students are confronted with a constantly increasing number of materials and media from which they can freely choose. Internet-based learning is one of the most important components of studying, which creates new opportunities and challenges such as inadequate sources, contradictory information, or a lack of transparency concerning the underlying interests of a source. Therefore, students need special skills to recognize and use high-quality online information in their studies. They need to be able to evaluate relevance, credibility and accuracy to determine the quality of the information used while avoiding distorting or misleading sources and protecting themselves from deception, error, or bias. Nevertheless, there has been little research on the medium to long-term relationship between individual use of online information in studies and study-related learning outcomes.
Concept and Research Objective
Critical Online Reasoning (COR) combines the various skills required to deal with information on the internet in one construct. The DFG-funded CORE research group is investigating these skills and their development in a longitudinal study in several study domains. Within the CORE research group, a cooperation between the DIPF, Goethe University Frankfurt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, the GEN-CORE project deals with the generic part of COR skills, for which no domain-specific professional knowledge is required. The students selected from four study domains (medicine, sociology, economics, and physics) take part in four measurement sessions during their studies, where they solve generic and domain-specific information problems using the Internet. During their research the students’ behavior is recorded and they formulate written answers - this makes it possible to track the student’s profiles and the types of visited websites, why they select or reject certain sources and which criteria they use to assess the credibility of a website. CORE is designed as a longitudinal study to reliably measure the level of development of generic and domain-specific COR skills over the course of undergraduate study and their relationship to higher education learning outcomes.
For the assessment of generic COR skills, the project aims to develop indicators for COR skills based on the collected log data and written text responses and to design a measurement model for them. In addition, their relationship with other cognitive abilities will be investigated. The project compares the generic COR skills of assessed students from the four domains and investigatestheir changes during their undergraduate studies to obtain insight into the development of COR skills.
